I went to see Angels and Demons today.  If you read my blog, you know this was the first book I read this year.  While the movie didn’t stay true to the book (Do they ever?), it didn’t stray from the main storyline much either. Overall, it was a decent adaptation that nonreaders are sure to enjoy.

It’s interesting to see what characters Hollywood writers focus on and which ones are crucial to the book’s plot, but don’t make it onto the screen.  Vittoria’s father played a huge part in the beginning of the book in the antimatter plot, but is never mentioned in the movie.  In fact, the whole antimatter story which took up about 100 pages in the book is quickly summed up in five minutes at the beginning of the movie which kind of took away from the overall seriousness of it.  I was also disappointed to find they left out the head of CERN completely. While he is not mentioned in a big portion of the book, his wheelchair camera was an important part of revealing the bad guy.  The movie took a lot of focus off of CERN completely, and put more focus on someone inside the Vatican being responsible for the events.  Speaking of bad guys, the villian doing all the kidnapping and killing was not portrayed much as an evil guy at all.  He doesn’t even kidnap Vittoria in the movie; instead, he walks away from Vittoria and Langdon when they finally confront him.

One part of the book also focused on two reporters that were following the action as a subplot in the book.  In the movie, there was no focus on any set of reporters in particular.  Instead, there were only scenes of different reporters from different countries reporting the news from St. Peter’s Square at different scene breaks. It was clever to see how each reporter was reporting something different back to their homeland than the others, and when news of events was released it had been altered from the truth that had actually taken place.  A great metaphor for religion, science, history, and society today!

Also, in the book, all four cardinals who were kidnapped are successfully killed.  In the movie, the last cardinal survives and becomes Pope in the end.  Perhaps they changed this so that the one underlying event taking place throughout the movie and book (picking a new Pope) is given closure.

While this was Dan Brown’s first book featuring Robert Langdon as a characters, it’s interesting that The Da Vinci Code caused more of a stir among churches and got much more publicity than Angels and Demons did.  I thought Angels and Demons was just as rivoting when it comes to the book.  The movie, not so much, but it was still good and I highly recommend it.  Tom Hanks was his usual self, but I like him and don’t think I’ve seen a movie of his that I didn’t like.  Missing storylines and characters, or not, I still enjoyed the movie and I’m glad I saw it.